In-Content Preferences for Firefox may be here in 16 weeks

Today is the first day of the semester for students at Michigan State University. A group of 4 to 5 students from Michigan State’s CSE Capstone course will be working with Mozilla to move the preferences from a dialog window to within the content area of the browser.

This work is done as part of a course at Michigan State that computer science students take before they graduate. The students work with companies within industry to get some more real-world experience and build their professional network. The course is officially called “CSE 498: Collaborative Design”, but the informal and popular name is “the Capstone course”.

One of the areas that continues to lack enough features is the Add-ons Manager (AM). Where AM was lacking before other add-ons filled in. Unfortunately since FF 4, many of those add-ons have not been updated and so AM lacks some keys features to help those that do install many add-ons. What I would like to see are the following simple changes:

More information: Add-on version, compatibility info, date installed/updated (maybe create preference to choose what info is visible)
Add filtering: display only enabled, only disabled, or all add-ons
more advanced filtering: display only incompatible add-ons, those needing a restart, show only just enabled, or just disabled
More sorting capabilities: enabled vs disabled
Grouping: ability to create groups of add-ons (e.g. to identify add-ons with similar, related, or complementary functionality), then the ability to enable/disable groups of add-ons.